I am researching carts at the moment and want to gather some info from you guys. I am completely inexperienced with HTML or any programming of any kind, I am starting an online retail website, I am selling suspension parts for porsche's and I am very confused with this process of choosing a cart. I was set on Sunshop because it sounds like everything I need, lots of good templates so I dont have to learn much HTML right off the bat, options galore, integrated with quick books (!!!!), etc... but I have looked at x-cart and that looks pretty good, but I do not understand the differences. When they say free upgrades for a year (sunshop), upgrades of what?? My budget is not high, say 250 maybe 300 so these 2 naturally fell into that category. I want to spend my time running my business not fiddling with much irritating code. My gateway provider is Chase paymentech, soon to be anyhow, and they can authorize Sunshop through authorize.net, but I don't know about stuff like zencart or x-cart. I guess I am asking, if you wanted to make a reasonable looking start up website with as little hassle as possible, with the reasonable budget I described or less, preferrabley, which cart floats your boat?

Hi,
The free upgrades is applied on the software itself, so at the end of the year you will still have the latest release if you want. To be honest if I were you I would choose a shopping cart from the suitable ones which has the preferred payment gateway integrated into the application, since this is the most important factor in my point of view.
Regards,
Zoli

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http://www.bosscart.co.uk/

I downloaded Zen cart to have a look at what it is and found there to be all sorts of jargan I just do not understand. Sunshop I have heard, does not have good customer support. The paymentech authorized carts seem to be either very expensive or something I don't want. I wish this was simpler lol, I just want to post up a website. Is there any online noob info that has been colaborated that can help me sift through the jargan?

[disclosure - i'm a huge zen-cart fan]

If you don't know HTML your really not going to like php or any real language

I suggest using looking at eBay and/or yahoo stores. I have pointed non technical family members to this and they have gotten up and running quickly. I was skeptical but in the end I was impressed.

A friend of mine just wrote up an article on this (link below) which includes some rough cost outlines and examples.

http://www.octoecom.com/forum/viewto...t=zen+ebay#p74

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Bill Parker
itode.com -> eCommerce
billparker.org -> motivational

Leroy no slam intended if you are a zen fan but what about SEO friendly URL's?

From what i have seen Zen gives you something like this -


.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5_8&product s_id=117

Sun Shop gives you something like this

.com/shop/watches/Milano-Jr.-GREEN-317.html

Nah, simple module addition and you can get as granular as you want with your URLs. Here's a sample product page at one of my stores:

http://www.xekoshop.com/xeko-starter...ica-p-414.html

Cheers,
Bill

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Bill Parker
itode.com -> eCommerce
billparker.org -> motivational

Thanks for putting me straight - sorry about missing your name tag Bill

There are a lot of shopping cart solutions out there on the web, but of the ones you mention above, X-Cart is the best. Still, if you are looking for something that doesn't require a lot of code knowledge, then you're better off using Shopify or something more "out of the box" like that. Here's an easy to use shopping cart comparison tool that might help.

One way to cut costs is to use an installable shopping cart like TopShopper. For a one off payment you can use the shopping cart forever and are able to customise it to suit yourself.
Even though they may be ASP or PHP based, you normally would need no knowledge of the scripting language to use them.

Mike

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Mike

TopShopper Shopping Carts
http://www.topshopper.net